Question:
How can a running system suddenly reboot and show the message:
Disk Boot Failure - Insert System Disk and Press Enter
instead of booting the OS?
It doesn't seem to be caused by a defective physical disk. Can the disk controller cause it? How can I prevent this happening again?
Details:
- This time, the computer was running Win7 and was always on. Automatic updates are disabled; the computer should never reboot by itself unless there's a power outage, which there wasn't. (Brownouts don't occur where I live.) There are no USB devices attached.
- I came home and found that the machine had apparently rebooted and was showing the message:
Disk Boot Failure - Insert System Disk and Press Enter
instead of booting the OS. - I had this exact situation once before -- on the same machine but running WinVista -- and a simple
chkdsk
solved the problem. But on Win7 that trick does not work. I can't access the event log because it doesn't boot. The Samsung 1TB hard-disk itself is only a few months old. I have not tried Tune HD. - I tried booting from the Win7 installation DVD and
repair
the installation, but the DVD kept hanging during boot. Something was preventingsetup
from starting, and booting the DVD insafe mode
showed that it hung during or after loading thedisk
driver. - The same disk wouldn't boot in another computer either, same message.
- I installed Win7 on a new physical disk -- that worked. After letting the machine run for a few hours (nothing installed, just a totally clean Win7 without any updates), I came back to the machine and it again showed that message! On a new disk!
- I'm beginning to suspect that it's not related to the physical disk, and not to any installed software either. I don't like to install again and then sit for hours and watch the screen, just to try to discover why/how/when this happens. I'm now not sure what to do, what to fix.
I don't want to install Win7 over and over again, and I need this computer up and running as soon as possible. I don't want to have to replace components one by one either until it's a new machine next to a drawer full of junk...
Can this error be caused by a malfunction in the disk controller, or perhaps in the power supply? I don't have any spare components lying around that I could test.
Update:
One month has passed and the machine has worked fine. Now, it just happened again, the system disk won't boot. Luckily I've now learned to keep important stuff on secondary drives, so I'm just going to format and re-image the system disk and see if it helps. And I'll install a new disk controller at the same time, to make sure the onboard controller won't crash the new image as well. This is getting tiresome.